Douglas Stewart

That's right.

Yeah, see, Cal has just graduated from textile college and he is sort of entered into Scotland at a time where the textile industry is having a really tough time.

So he spent the summer in Edinburgh couch surfing and borrowing off of his friends and cleaning the toilets in the local pub.

And he calls home to the Isle of Harris twice a week to talk to his father and his grandmother and mostly to worship with his father, who is a presenter in the local church up there.

And one day he calls home to his dad and his dad says the line, your grandmother's feet are as purple as calf liver.

It's time for you to come home.

She's unwell.

And so his father calls Cal back to the small croft in Harris to take care of his granny there.

And, of course, it's at that time in every young person's life where they feel like they've just left home, they're about to become their own self, and you're called back with this great sense of duty.

And I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that almost as soon as Cal gets home to the island, he realises things are not quite what they were made out to be.

Yeah.

Well, the McLeod family live on the east coast of Harris, which for anyone who's ever been would know it's one of the most beautiful spots in all of Britain.

But it's a very lunar landscape.

It's a barren landscape.

You know, there's thick shelves of anorthosite and mica and quite a thin layer of soil over the top of it.

And the crofts there are quite far apart.

You know, there is a sense of being by yourself when you're when you're on the east coast there.

Cal, the settlement that I have imagined, which is entirely, the island is real, but the settlement is entirely fictional, has only 26 people in it.

And like many rural places, there's not a lot of young people.

Cal is one of only, he says in the book, three people under the age of 40.